Emotional prosody processing in Autism Spectrum Disorder (original) (raw)
Related papers
Atypical perception of affective prosody in Autism Spectrum Disorder
NeuroImage. Clinical, 2014
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by impairments in language and social-emotional cognition. Yet, findings of emotion recognition from affective prosody in individuals with ASD are inconsistent. This study investigated emotion recognition and neural processing of affective prosody in high-functioning adults with ASD relative to neurotypical (NT) adults. Individuals with ASD showed mostly typical brain activation of the fronto-temporal and subcortical brain regions in response to affective prosody. Yet, the ASD group showed a trend towards increased activation of the right caudate during processing of affective prosody and rated the emotional intensity lower than NT individuals. This is likely associated with increased attentional task demands in this group, which might contribute to social-emotional impairments.
Neural bases of emotional language processing in individuals with and without autism
2015
A fundamental aspect of successful social interactions is the ability to accurately infer others' verbal communication, often including information related to the speaker's feelings. Autism spectrum disorder is characterized by language and social-affective impairments, and also aberrant functional neural responses to socially-relevant stimuli. The main objective of the current research was to examine the behavioral and neural effects of making affective inferences from language lacking overt prosody or explicit emotional words in individuals with and without autism. In neurotypical individuals, the current data are consistent with previous studies showing that verbal emotional stimuli enhances activation of brain regions generally responsive to discourse, and also "social-affective" brain regions, specifically medial/orbital frontal regions, bilateral middle temporal areas, temporal parietal junction/superior temporal gyri and pCC/PC. Moreover, these regions respond differentially to positive and negative valence, most clearly in the medial frontal area. Further, results suggest that mentalizing alone does not account for the differences between emotional and neutral stories, as all of our stories required similar inferencing of the feelings of the protagonist. In autism, there is general agreement that the neurodevelopmental disorder is marked by impairments in pragmatic language understandings, emotional processes, and the ability to "mentalize," others' thoughts, intentions and beliefs. However, findings are mixed regarding the precise nature of emotional language understandings. Results of the present study suggest that autistic individuals are able to make language-based emotional inferences, and that like neurotypical controls, social-affective brain regions show task-related facilitation effects for emotional compared to neutral valence. However, the neural activations in the autism group were generally greater than controls, especially in response to emotion. Additionally, results showed greater difficulty with incongruent judgments in participants with autism. Together, these findings represent a first step toward revealing social-affective abilities in the language context in autism, despite irregular brain response. Such understandings are critical to generating effective intervention strategies and therapeutic practices for autistic individuals and their families. For remediation to be most beneficial, one must understand and utilize areas of skill, and leverage those to positively impact deficits.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2014
Prosody is an important tool of human communication, carrying both affective and pragmatic messages in speech. Prosody recognition relies on processing of acoustic cues, such as the fundamental frequency of the voice signal, and their interpretation according to acquired socioemotional scripts. Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show deficiencies in affective prosody recognition. These deficiencies have been mostly associated with general difficulties in emotion recognition. The current study explored an additional association between affective prosody recognition in ASD and auditory perceptual abilities. Twenty high-functioning male adults with ASD and 32 typically developing male adults, matched on age and verbal abilities undertook a battery of auditory tasks. These included affective and pragmatic prosody recognition tasks, two psychoacoustic tasks (pitch direction recognition and pitch discrimination), and a facial emotion recognition task, representing nonvocal e...
The Perception of Affective Prosody in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders and Typical Peers
Clinical Archives of Communication Disorders
This study investigated the ability of children with ASD, including the minimally verbal subgroup, to perceive angry, neutral, and happy prosody in low-pass filtered speech when provided with a structured training paradigm. Methods: 13 children with ASD and 21 TD children completed the experimental task and two additional measures (nonverbal cognitive abilities, social responsiveness deficits) for regression analyses. Results: The ASD group recognized prosodic conditions significantly less accurately than the TD group, and took significantly longer times to recognize all sentences compared to the TD group. Angry prosody was consistently the most difficult to recognize across groups. Nonverbal cognitive abilities is a significant predictor variable for successful recognition of neutral and happy prosody; although low nonverbal cognitive skills do not preclude minimally verbal children with ASD from accurately perceiving affective prosody. Conclusions: The present study shows it is possible for minimally verbal children with ASD to successfully participate in experimental research using judgment tasks when provided with appropriate training.
Underconnectivity of the superior temporal sulcus predicts emotion recognition deficits in autism
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2013
Neurodevelopmental disconnections have been assumed to cause behavioral alterations in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Here, we combined measurements of intrinsic functional connectivity (iFC) from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with task-based fMRI to explore whether altered activity and/or iFC of the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) mediates deficits in emotion recognition in ASD. Fifteen adults with ASD and 15 matched-controls underwent resting-state and task-based fMRI, during which participants discriminated emotional states from point light displays (PLDs). Intrinsic FC of the right pSTS was further examined using 584 (278 ASD/306 controls) resting-state data of the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE). Participants with ASD were less accurate than controls in recognizing emotional states from PLDs. Analyses revealed pronounced ASD-related reductions both in task-based activity and resting-state iFC of the right pSTS with fronto-parietal areas typically encompassing the action observation network (AON). Notably, pSTS-hypo-activity was related to pSTS-hypo-connectivity, and both measures were predictive of emotion recognition performance with each measure explaining a unique part of the variance. Analyses with the large independent ABIDE dataset replicated reductions in pSTS-iFC to fronto-parietal regions. These findings provide novel evidence that pSTS hypo-activity and hypo-connectivity with the fronto-parietal AON are linked to the social deficits characteristic of ASD. We are grateful to all the subjects who voluntarily participated in this research and to E. Nackaerts for her help with data collection. We thank I. Noens, J. Wagemans and other members of the Leuven Autism Research Consortium (LAuRes) for discussion and aid in subject recruitment. We would also like to thank all the members of the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange Consortium (ABIDE; http://fcon\_1000.projects.nitrc.org/indi/abide/) and Michael P. Milham and the INDI team (http://fcon\_1000.projects.nitrc.org/) supporting the ABIDE effort. We especially thank the sites whose data were included in these analyses and their funding sources: (i) Olin, Institute of Living at Hartford Hospital [Autism Speaks (to M.A.), Hartford Hospital (to M.A.)], (ii)
The neural underpinnings of prosody in autism
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 2008
As a neurodevelopmental disorder, autism is characterized by impairments and differences at the levels of both brain and behavior. Communicative impairments in autism are a core feature of the disorder, and a rapidly-expanding literature is exploring language in autism using the tools of cognitive neuroscience, particularly electroencephalography and brain imaging. Recent research indicates consistent differences in the degree to which languagespecific processes are lateralized in the brain, and also suggests that language impairments are linked to differences in brain structure that may lead to inefficient coordination of activity between different neural assemblies in order to achieve a complex cognitive task, defined as functional connectivity. We review findings from current work, and suggest that neurobiological data are critical in our ability to understand the mechanisms underlying behavioral differences in communicative skills. Going beyond simple dichotomies between delayed versus deviant development, we can use such data to ask whether behavior reflects processes that are merely inefficient, or instead, whether impairments at the behavioral level reflect fundamental differences in brain organization and the networks involved in various tasks.
The Integration of Prosodic Speech in High Functioning Autism: A Preliminary fMRI Study
PLOS One, 2010
Background: Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by a specific triad of symptoms such as abnormalities in social interaction, abnormalities in communication and restricted activities and interests. While verbal autistic subjects may present a correct mastery of the formal aspects of speech, they have difficulties in prosody (music of speech), leading to communication disorders. Few behavioural studies have revealed a prosodic impairment in children with autism, and among the few fMRI studies aiming at assessing the neural network involved in language, none has specifically studied prosodic speech. The aim of the present study was to characterize specific prosodic components such as linguistic prosody (intonation, rhythm and emphasis) and emotional prosody and to correlate them with the neural network underlying them.
Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders
Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to selfarchive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".